When is Google’s Birthday?

Google is without a doubt the most popular search engine available today. In fact, it is so popular to the extent that the term ‘Google’ has become a verb. Google has become so entwined with our lives that we have incorporated phrases like ‘just google it’ in our day to day communication. This internet giant has greatly progressed since its inception nearly two decades ago. From personal computers to smartphone devices, Google stands as a facilitator to the internet. From its eccentric doodles to high speed and range of data connectivity, Google is everyone’s trusted search engine.

It is quite interesting to know the humble origins of such a mega company. The birth date of Google is quite a controversial topic. Many people make several claims and give different explanations and versions for different dates. Why should the birth date of this multi-national technological company cause so much confusion? Read on to find out.

Google – A short walk through memory lane

The inception

It was late 1995 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the initial founders of Google met. They were both grad students at the prestigious Stanford University in California. In 1996 while pursuing their PhDs, they formed a strange friendship cum business partnership. They decided to eliminate the flaws in the conventional search engines that existed around that time. These search engines showed results based on the number of times a particular keyword appeared on the web page. Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on a different algorithmic method called PageRank that was based on the number of pages and their importance to the original site. This idea of determining a web page’s relevance with the help of ‘citations’ marked the birth of Google.

Why the name ‘Google’?

The citation was more of an academic term that was used to show the importance of scholarly papers. This idea was used to create the base of the new search engine. Before an official name was given, the new search engine developed by these two was nicknamed “BackRub”. Then the name was officially changed to ‘Google’. Google is actually the misspelling of the word “googol”. Googol is basically a number that can be signified by a one followed by a 100 zeros. This large number was used to derive the name as the number is a symbolic representation that Google can process such large amounts of data.

Initially, before Google was a standalone company, it ran on the University’s website under the domain name, google.stanford.edu.Soon enough this search engine started to gain immense popularity and began to grow tremendously. Stanford’s network could no longer support it. As a result Page and Brin dropped out of Stanford and began working towards launching Google as a start-up.

The Official launch

Google was launched in the September of 1997 and registered with the current web domain name www.google.com. But it was not until the next year, in September 1998, that Google was officially available for business. So now we have got the inception, the naming, the origin of the standalone start-up, the registering and acquiring of the domain name and the official launching. All these dates are different and occur across a span of four or five years. One can take any of this as the birth date of Google. This is the reason for so many confusions and arguments regarding the potential start date of Google.

So when is Google’s birthday?

Many accepted that either the registration of the company domain or the launch dates should be considered as the birth date. Both these happened on September one year apart. This fixes the month at September and the later launching in 1998 is considered the base for the year count. This just leaves the date.

It is widely said that the launching was done on either September 4th or 7th. But it is interesting to note that both these are not the birthday. In the early 2000’s Google announced its birthday once on September 5th and also another time on September 8th. But since 2006, they have finally settled for September 27th. No one knows the exact reason for this, but you can hope to find a birthday doodle on this date every year.

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Hello everyone, this is Sam, I'm an Engineering Graduate and Blogger by profession. In this blog, I will provide the best Information related to Technology for new Internet Users.
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